Quotes from Oswald Spengler

Whoever cannot believe and yet longs for it, whoever knows how miserable the Enlightenment is and yet cannot get rid of it, also knows what hell is. To be banished knowingly into unbelief.

At all times and in all places, the men and women of every culture deserve each other.

There are no 'men-in-themselves' such as the philosophers talk about, but only men of a time, of a locality, of a race, of a personal cast, who contend in battle with a given world and win through or fail, while the universe around them moves slowly on with a godlike unconcern. This battle is life — life, indeed, in the Nietzschean sense, a grim, pitiless, no-quarter battle of the Will-to-Power.

Will and loneliness are at bottom the same.

It is a bizarre, but nevertheless psychologically exact, fact that the physics of the Greeks — being statics and not dynamics — neither knew the use nor felt the absence of the time-element, whereas we on the other hand work in thousandths of a second.

Democracy has become a weapon of moneyed interests. It uses the media to create the illusion that there is consent from the governed. The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play. The notion of democracy is often no different than living under a plutocracy or a government by wealthy elites.

In reality, however, it is out of the power either of heads or hands to alter in any way the destiny of machine-technics, for this has developed out of inward spiritual necessities and is now correspondingly maturing towards its fulfilment and end. Today we stand on the summit, at the point when the fifth act is beginning. The last decisions are taking place, the tragedy is closing.

A boundless mass of human Being, flowing in a stream without banks; up-stream, a dark past wherein our time-sense loses all powers of definition and restless or uneasy fancy conjures up geological periods to hide away an eternally unsolvable riddle; down-stream, a future even so dark and timeless –– such is the groundwork of the Faustian picture of human history.

Every soul has religion, which is only another word for its existence. All living forms in which it expresses itself—all arts, doctrines, customs, all metaphysical and mathematical form-worlds, all ornament, every column and verse and idea—are ultimately religious, and must be so.

Of this economic Stoicism of the Classical world the exact antithesis is Socialism, meaning thereby not Marx's theory but Frederick William I's Prussian practice which long prededed Marx and will displace him – the socialism […] that comprehends and cares for permanent economic relations, trains the individual in his duty to the whole, and glorifies hard work as an affirmation of Time and Future.

What the myth of Götterdämmerung signified of old, the irreligious form of it, the theory of Entropy, signifies to-day—world's end as completion of an inwardly necessary evolution.

Servitude and freedom—this is in the last and deepest analysis the differentia by which we distinguish vegetable and animal existence. A herd that huddles together trembling in the presence of danger, a child that clings weeping to its mother, a man desperately striving to force a way into his God—all these are seeking to return out of the life of animal freedom into the vegetal servitude from which they were emancipated.

War is the creator, hunger the destroyer, of all great things.

Can criticism then, as criticism, solve the great questions, or can it merely pose them? At the beginning of knowledge we believe the former. But the more we know, the more certain we become of the latter. So long as we hope, we call the secret a problem.

Philosophie, die Liebe zur Wahrheit, ist im tiefsten Grunde die Abwehr des Unbegreiflichen.

All great discoveries and undertakings spring from the joy strong men feel in victory. They are products of individuality, not utilitarian thought.

You are caught in the current of unceasing change. Your life is a ripple in it. Every moment of your conscious life links the infinite past with the infinite future. Take part in both and you will not find the present empty.

Leben ist Tun und Leiden. Je wissender der Mensch, desto tiefer sein seelisches Leid.

It is one of the greatest achievements of Nietzsche that he confronted science with the problem of the

The man makes History, the woman is History.

We no longer believe in the power of reason over life. We feel that it is life which dominates reason.

There is but one end to all the conflict, and that is death—the death of individuals, of peoples, of cultures. Our own death still lies far ahead of us in the murky darkness of the next thousand years.

There is no substituting anything else for Life. After Life there is only Death.

Unity of space being thus reestablished, the infinity that is expanded in all directions by the picture is ruled by the Western perspective; and from perspective there runs a road straight to the comprehension of our astronomical world picture and its passionate pioneering into unending farness.